Monestir de Sant Esteve
Temple · Girona
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Monestir de Sant Esteve was founded in 812 as a Benedictine monastery and gave rise to the town of Banyoles itself, built over the remains of a late Roman temple. Reconstructions over the centuries left it mostly neoclassical, with a 1530 late-Gothic portal on an otherwise austere facade. Inside is the Reliquary of Saint Martirià, a Gothic goldsmithing piece holding the town's patron saint's relics.
The reliquary of Saint Martirià is a small Gothic building in miniature: a gilded-silver casket 65 cm long, shaped like a church with a pitched roof and a cross-topped pinnacle, its sides once ringed by twenty-six carved saints under ogival arches. Girona goldsmith Francesc Artau began it around 1413, and his son, Francesc Artau II, finished it in a Barcelona workshop decades later, around 1450. The monastery itself endured centuries of destruction and rebuilding before reaching its present form: Saracen raiders burned the first church in the 10th century, an 11th-century rebuild was reconsecrated in 1086, the earthquakes of 1427 and 1428 damaged it again, and 1655 brought down the bell tower and cloister outright. The neoclassical church standing today, built between 1702 and 1740, is the result of that long sequence of ruin and repair.
What you see
A domed bell tower crowns the church, visible above Banyoles's rooftops well before the rest of the monastery comes into view.
monasterybenedictinegothic reliquaryart theft